1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for processing information, and a providing medium, and more particularly to a method of and an apparatus for transferring data efficiently at high speed, and a providing medium for providing a program and/or data to carry out such a method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, graphic computers and video entertainment systems are required to perform high-speed signal processing for making displayed images highly realistic and impressive. To meet the requirement, it has been attempted to incorporate in such graphic: computers and video entertainment systems a plurality of DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) for executing floating-point product-sum calculations at high speed, the DSPs being mounted, together with a CPU, a memory device, and other necessary semiconductor devices, on a circuit board for parallel signal processing.
For designing a desired circuit with the DSPs mounted on the circuit board, however, the memory device needs to be of a large bit width configuration for transferring data at a high rate. In order to be used with the memory device of a large bit width configuration, the DSPs are required to have a number of terminals, resulting in an increased DSP package size. If a general-purpose memory device is to be used, then a plurality of such general-purpose memory devices because each one of the general-purpose memory devices has a small storage capacity. For the above reasons, the circuit board is necessarily large in size, and interconnections between devices, e.g., interconnections between the memory device and the DSPs, are long, so that signal transfer delays will be caused by stray capacities on the circuit board. As a result, signals cannot be transferred efficiently at a high, rate. Furthermore, as the number of devices used increases, their power consumption and heat generation increase. The large-size circuit board tends to degrade itself soon.
A bootstrap program for the graphic computers and video entertainment systems is fixedly stored in a built-in ROM. Therefore, even when a bug in the bootstrap program is found, it is difficult to eliminate the bug from the bootstrap program.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to increase the signal processing capability of an apparatus such as a graphic computer or a video entertainment system, and allow a program in such an apparatus to be easily modified.
The above and other objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will become more apparent from the following description when taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which preferred embodiments of the present invention are shown by way of example.